PurposeThe emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms in product companies opens up new data-driven business opportunities. This paper looks at the emergence of these IoT platforms from a business-model perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe study applies a mixed method with two research studies: Study I–a cluster analysis based on a quantitative survey, and Study II–case studies based on qualitative interviews.FindingsThe findings reveal that there is no gradual shift in a company's business model, but in fact three distinct and sequential patterns of business model innovations: (1) platform skimming, (2) platform revenue generation and (3) platform orchestration.Research limitations/implicationsThe results are subject to the typical limitations of both quantitative and qualitative studies.Practical implicationsThe results provide guidance to managers on how to modify the components of the business model (value proposition, value creation and/or delivery and profit equation) in order to enable platforms to advance.Social implicationsAs IoT platforms continue to advance, product companies achieve better performance in terms of productivity and profitability, and more easily secure competitive advantages and jobs.Originality/valueThe paper makes three original contributions: (1) it is the first quantitative study on IoT platforms in product companies, (2) identifies three patterns of business model innovations and (3) offers a first process perspective for understanding the sequence of these patterns as IoT platforms advance.

In this paper we show the outline of an integration of unstructured data and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) approaches into a chatbot framework. We describe how RPA applications are connected to a chatbot system and show a possible system sketch. Furthermore, we describe the integration of Open Question Answering techniques like DocChat, semantic clustering and the Universal Sentence Encoder in order to acquire direct answers to user questions from documents. From this, we derive a standalone bot framework that we will use in the future for deployment in industrial contexts. For this purpose, we integrate the tools in a user and application-oriented way in the near future.

No abstract